Technology AI, Science and New Things
If the world's data centres were a country, they'd consume about the same amount of power as Italy and Austria combined. That demand for energy will rise exponentially as homo sapiens outsources more and more of its thinking to chips and AI, and so will the land area covered by these giant hangars full of microprocessors. Bloomberg has put together a series of satellite images captured over 22 years of a patch of Loudoun County, Virginia, that didn't always sit smack in the middle of "data centre alley" but does now. Forest and farmland give way faster and faster to data centres and attendant malls, schools, parking lots – and power plants. One Nvidia H100 chip uses as much electricity as eight 60-inch TVs. Microsoft's next big supercomputer will use the equivalent of nearly half a million of them. And still it won’t be able to replicate the intuition or imagination of a single human brain.
